Nothing [but us] is sacred

from film: HyperNormalisation, 2016, Adam Curtis

1975. Setting: NY and Damascus; Both see change in power from politics to something… else

NY

Politicians for 30 years had been borrowing money from banks to pay for growing services and welfare

Early ’70s, middle class flees city, their taxes disappear too

Banks lend city even more; worried about whether city could pay back its debt

1975: lending stops; city holds regular meeting to issue bonds in return for the loans, overseen by city’s financial controller

Banks don’t show up; don’t want bonds

This day marks radical shift in power

Banks insist that, to protect their loans, they should be allowed to take control of the city

New committee set up, made mostly of bankers

Bankers enforce austerity: sack teachers, police, firefighters

Strange thing: no one opposes the bankers, including the left, who retreated

Rise of new powerful individualism that did not jibe with collective action

Individual radical watches city with cool, ironic detachment; experiencing the city, but not wanting to change it

New radicalism would try to change people’s minds with self expression, not collective action

Some of the left saw something else going on: this new generation was losing touch with the reality of power

Trump knew how to use this new kind of power: there was no future in building housing for ordinary people because all the government grants had gone

He saw other ways to get money out of the state: he bought up derelict buildings in NY, saying he’d transform them into luxury hotels and appartments

He negotiates the biggest tax break in city’s history: $160 million

City and banks agree and lend him the money

He pays nothing and transforms the city into one for the rich

Damascus

Conflict between 2 men: US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the president of Syria, Hafez al-Assad

This battle would have profound consequences –> idea that you could run the world as a stable system

Assad was brutal and ruthless, but he believed the violence was for the purpose of uniting Arab countries to stand up to the West

Kissinger, also ruthless, started in 1950s with “the delicate balance of terror”

This system ran the Cold War

Saw himself as a political realist; history is struggle of power between people and nations

Saw the world as a delicate system; must keep system balance

Set to impose this world systems analysis on Middle East; must deal with Assad

Assad convinced that Palestinian refugees must return to homeland if there were going to be peace with Israel

Kissinger thought that strengthening the Arabs would destabilize his balance of power: set out to fracture power of Arab countries by dividing them, pitting them against each other so they’d keep each other in check–“constructive ambiguity”

Series of meetings: he persuaded Egypt to sign separate agreement with Israel, while also leading Assad to believe he was working for a wider peace agreement that included Palestinians

In reality, Palestinians were ignored as irrelevant to power balance of the world system

Assad got pissed off over Kissinger’s going behind his back, would “release demons of Arab world”–he retreats and builds a looming palace in Damascus

Inside Soviet Empire

By 1980s, it was clear that the socialist dream had failed–its society no longer believed in a vision of the future

Technocrats, instead of reveal that the socialist dream had failed because of failures in planning, decided to pretend that everything was still going according to plan: a fake version of society emerges (hence the film’s title)

Everyone could see clearly that it wasn’t, but played along because they couldn’t imagine an alternative

Hypernormalization: you were so much a part of the system, that it was impossible to see beyond it; the fakeness was hypernormal (c.f. Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism)

Two brothers give literary voice to a new dissident movement–Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, science fiction writers

Roadside Picnic, which was adapted to film as Stalker

The Human Bomb

Ronald Reagan is sworn in January 20th, 1981

New vision of the world; simple, moral crusade; America must fight “evil” and make the world a better place; no longer Kissinger’s realist approach

Israel now determined to destroy Palestinians; in 1982, Israel sent massive army to encircle Palestinian camps in Lebanon

SABRA camps, 2,000 Palestinian refugees massacred in the camps, Israel allowed it to happen, as a Christian Lebanese faction (Israeli allies) executed it

In face of horror, Reagan insists on sending a neutral group of Marines to Beirut to keep peace

Assad was convinced of another reality: another American-Israeli conspiracy to quash Arabs

Assad set on getting Americans out of Middle East; joins up with new revolutionary force of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran (three years after the Iranian Revolution of 1979)

Khomeini would provide Assad with a new weapon he’d just created: suicide bombings, or “the poor man’s atomic bomb“

Khomeini came to power during Iranian revolution; claims that Shia Islamic tradition promotes the bombings (w/ self-mutilation/penitence=killing yourself for the greater good of the revolution)

Khomeini mobilized this force when it was attacked by Iraq and faced with almost certain defeat, given Saddam’s superior weapons, many supplied by America

Khomeini sent many young people to walk though mine fields and use their bodies to open up paths

Assad takes this new human weapon to the West for the first time: this is when it becomes form of suicide bombing

LSD would open your mind to new realities; free from politicians and those in power; an LSD society of peace

Cyberspace was real acid trip; free from hierarchies of corruption and corporations

Barlow’s manifesto told politicians and money to stay out: this vision dominates internet for the next 20 years

But 2 hackers call him out for being a utopian: Phiber Obtik and Acid Phreak

Infuriated with claim that cyberspace was without hierarchy

Acid Phreak hacks TRW (who built systems that ran Cold War, then adapted to run new systems of credit and debt)

TRW’s computers amalgamated American’s debt and issued credit ratings

The hackers broke in, stole Barlow’s credit rating, and published it online–demonstrating growing powers of finance; how companies that ran new systems of credit knew more about you, using that info to control your destiny

System that allowed this to happen was the networks of information connected by computer service, a new world power that had replaced politics

The Colonel

After humiliating defeat in Lebanon, Reagan set out to show that America’s crusade was worthy of admiration: so he chose a scapegoat “villain”: Colonel Gaddafi, the ruler of Libya

Americans were going to use Gaddafi to create a fake terrorist mastermind; Gaddafi was going to happily play along because it would turn him into a famous global figure

Gaddafi had taken power from a coup in the 1970s

He believed he was an international revolutionary set to challenge the west

He had attended a course in London from 1966, hated the patronizing racism he experienced

Once in power, he developed his own idea of revolution: “Third Universal Theory”–an alternative to capitalism and communism, he published it and no one read it

He funneled money to Ireland to fight the British colonizers; by 1980s, he had no allies and no global influence

This all changes: Dec. 1985 terrorists attack Rome and Vienna airports simultaneously, 19 people killed, including 5 Americans–pressure for Reagan to retaliate

Reagan immediately claims that Gaddafi was behind the attacks; but European security services that investigated attacks claimed that Libya was not involved at all–in fact, the mastermind behind the attacks was Syria and their intelligence agencies

Gaddafi doesn’t deny anything, leaning into the role and threatening suicidal attacks on America–he grabs publicity from Americans and dramatizes it

Gaddafi’s claims to stand for oppressed people around the world, even black Americans

Promised to supply weapons to 400,000 African American “army” to fight white America

Gaddafi hires German rocket scientists to build him rockets for space exploration

No one believes him: journalists write that he plans to attack Europe

Americans and Gaddafi now locked into mutually reassuring relationship process in which a powerful new image was created and captured the imagination of the West: Gaddafi was the super villain of a “rogue state”

Another terrorist attack at discotec in west Berlin–bomb killed American soldier

Americans release “intercepts” from National Security Agency that they claimed proved Gaddafi was behind bombing and also the mastermind behind range of other attacks–Reagan orders Pentagon to be ready to bomb Libya

Still, there were doubts; this time in the American government itself–analysts were taking Gaddafi’s claims about himself as fact and using it to reinforce real actions

In effect, therefore, America and Gaddafi were playing off of each other and constructing a fake reality

European intelligence claims that it, again, was Syria who attacked in Berlin, but America refused to listen, since attacking Syria was too dangerous

Why go for Gaddafi instead? He had no allies–Americans believed there would be less Arab and Soviet support for Gaddafi

April 1986, Americans attack Libya

Targets: Gaddafi’s own house; he claims his adopted daughter was killed–some children did indeed die because of America’s sloppy bombing techniques (foreshadow: Obama-era drone strikes)

Gaddafi takes theater op to push his 3rd universal theory

The Truth is Out There

1980s saw uptick in claims of UFO sightings

American government may have made it all up; there were new high-tech weapons; believed Soviets were far stronger than they were and so they ought to develop new weapons

They pick people out and give them forged official documents about UFOs, which spread like wildfire and create the 1990s uptick in obsession with UFOs–it also fueled belief that governments lie to you

In America, fall of Soviet Union showed that politicians would not rule the world

Instead, there was a new system that had nothing to do with politics–a system that didn’t try to change things, but attempted to manage a post-political world

First to describe this change: left-wing German political thinker: Ulrich Beck: “any politician who claimed to be able to change things was seen as dangerous”–politics was reduced to trying to manage unpredictable events

Larry Fink, a banker, builds supercomputer that will predict the future

He starts company called Black Rock, builds computer called Alladin, housed in a series of large sheds in the apple orchards outside Wenatchee, WA

Could use it to predict risk of investment; computer monitors the world events and compares with past events

Guides $15 trillion

Prozac use increases

Another way of managing people: artificial intelligence

Eliza: computer psychotherapist–just repeats back what the patient said in different words

In an age of individualism, what made people feel secure was having themselves reflected back to them, just like in a mirror

AI grew to do just that via “intelligent agents,” gather massive data about people that then predicted what you’d want in the future–a system that ordered the world in a way that was centered around you

A Cautionary Tale

New system’s flaw: real world can’t be predicted from past data–Trump would later learn this

Jess Marcum receives a phone call in 1990 form Trump asking fro help: the guy is a nuclear scientist-turned gambler who used photographic memory to beat Vegas odds

The banks that lent Trump millions realized that he could no longer pay the interest on the loans–his empire was facing bankruptcy

Kashiwagi comes to Trump’s casino and starts winning millions of dollars, Trump freaks out, seeks help from Marcum who comes up with bet that would get back money; Kashi loses, Trump thinks he’s got his money back, then Kashi gets murdered and Trump never receives his money

1991 Damascus: Assad didn’t want stability, he wanted revenge on the U.S. for what Kissinger did when he snubbed the Arab world during the Egypt/Israel talks

Dec. 1988: bomb explodes on Pan Am plane over Lockerbie in Scotland–investigators and journalists (justifiably) blame Syria; claim it was in retaliation for America’s shooting down an Iranian airliner in the Gulf months before

But, 18 months later, security agencies come out that they were wrong: indeed, this time it was Libya behind the bombing, they claimed

Still, journalists and politicians didn’t believe it: this was a cynical decision on America’s behalf as it looked for an ally in Assad for the coming Gulf War against Saddam Hussein

So once again, they blame Gaddafi as terrorist mastermind

But Assad was not in control: the “human bomb” he’d introduced was now about to spread like a virus from Sunni to Shia Islam

December 1992, Hamas kidnaps and stabs to death Israeli border guard–Israel’s response was insane, rounding up 415 members of Hamas, bussing them to a mountain in Lebanon, and leaving them in Hezbollah territory

There, they spent 6 months, learned from Hezbollah of power of suicide bombing

Hamas then infiltrates heart of Israel, unleashing newly learned suicide bombing tactics, targeting civilians for the first time

Hamas is Sunni, a sect of Islam that, unlike Shia, doesn’t have rituals of self-sacrifice

Most senior religious leader in Saudi Arabia insisted this new tactic was wrong

But mainstream theologian from Egypt called Sheikh Qaradawi seized the moment, issuing fatwa that justified the attacks—adding “it’s justified to kill civilians, including women, because the latter serve in the military and are part of the army”

Suicide bombs continue to bombard Israel, politics no longer serve to deal with the Palestinian crisis

Hafez al-Assad had died in 2000, and his son Basharal–Assadbecamethe new president of Syria

Bashar couldn’t escape the inexorable logic his father had started

He wasn’t into politics, was a computer nerd, loved Electric Light Orchestra, wouldn’t have been president if his brother, Bassel, hadn’t died in a car crash

But still, he saw America’s invasion of Iraq as just the first step of a plot by Western powers to take over whole of middle east

He knew the invasion pissed off radical Islamists in Syria who then wanted to go to Iraq and kill Americans—Bashar instructed Syrian Intelligent Services to help them do this

Syrian agents set up pipeline that began tofeed thousands of militants across the border and into the heart of the insurgency

Within a year, almost all of foreign fighters were coming thru Syria—they brought suicide bombing with them

More chaos—most of the jihadists had joined the group al–Qaeda in Iraq, which then turned to killingShi’ites in an attempt tocreate a civil war

The force that had originally been invented by the Shi’ites, suicide bombing, now returned to kill them

Tony Blairand George Bush were faced with a disaster as Iraq was imploding, while at home they were accused of lying to their own people to justify the invasion—they needed something toshow the invasion was having a good effect on the Arab world

So, they turned to help from Colonel Gaddafi, who would now be their new best friend and democratichero

Everyone, not just politicians, would become involved (PR, academics, TV, spies, musicians were all going to help reinvent him)—this would show just how many people in the West had become engineers of this fake world

Cue Blair and Bush making televised statements that Gaddafi was the shit for dismantling his WMDs

But Gaddafi never had WMDs, just old mustard gas in leaking barrels—but now he had to pretend he had them, and the West had to pretend they avoided another global threat

As partof the deal, the West claims that if Gaddafiadmitted that Libya had doneLockerbie bombings, they’d lift sanctions

But many who investigated Lockerbie were still convinced Libya hadn’t done, it was Syria

Still, Gaddafi confessed to get sanctions lifted

New lies built upon old likes to construct completely fake work

PR firms come to Libya to “reframe the narrative”

One firm is paid 3 million to turn Gaddafi into a “modern world thinker”

They bring other world thinkers to Libya to discuss Gadaffi’s ideas—like Lord Anthony Giddens, who had a theory called the Third Way

Gaddafi finally achieves life-long dream: he’s invited to the UN and gives talk about his theory for 2 hours; he even calls for investigation into MLK’s and Kennedy’s assassination

When in NY, he’s given a mansion tent, which is organized by Trump

A World Without Power

People in Britain and America turn away from politics; Iraq War causes them to feel they were lied to over WMDs, but also a deeper feeling: that whatever they did or said had no effect

Whole new generation of liberals, leftists, radical retreat, turning away from hypocritical political world to cyberspace

Now, cyberspace was insane with its human-behavior predictive algorithms, etc.

Judea Pearl, scientist, was father of modern AI; his breakthrough was to use Bayesian Belief Networks

BBN: systems that could predict behavior even when the information was incomplete

To make the system work, Pearl and others import a modelof human beings drawn from economics: they created rational agents

Rational agents: software that mimicked human beings but in a very simplified form; model assumed that the agent would always act rationally to get what it wanted and nothing more

Jaron Lanier, early utopian of cyberspace, warns of implications: the agents model will always be a cartoon, and so you’ll see the world as a cartoon through the agent, you’ll never know who they’re working for: you or someone else

Cue talk about fact that anyone and everyone can upload videos to cyberspace—terror videos, death videos, porn, etc.

This was a world that old systems of power had difficulty dealing with; in wake of 9/11, security agencies secretly collected data on millions of people online

One program was called “Optic Nerve”: took stills from webcam conversations of people across the world in attempt to spot next terrorist attack

The program finds no terrorist; but did discover lots of dicks

But people use new tech to broadcast images of themselves that they want people to see them as

Like 2-way mirror, the simplified agents were watching, predicting, and guiding your hand on the mouse

Cue bubbles of self-interest: people only hear and see what they like, including news feeds

New power: decisions to show or hide certain things from you

Then oldutopian vision of cyberspacereemerges: cue Occupy Wall Street

Financial crisis of 2008, politicians save banks but do nothing about massive corruption that was revealed in its wake—reason cited was that it might destabilize the system

Public anger led to Occupy, which took Wall Street and then Washington

Occupy set out to build Barlow’s utopia—each person was an autonomous individual that expressed what they believed, yet still acted as a collective of components in a network that organized itself through the feedback of information around the system (using example the communication in large crowd where crowd repeats the words of one person to relay information to people out of ear-shot of original speaker)

You could organize people without the exercise of power

Cue ArabSpring in Tunisia –> Egypt

January 25, 2011, thousands of Egyptians come out in groups in Cairo and start moving toward Tahrir Square—seemed like a spontaneous uprising, but internet played key role

Many Western Liberals see it as a powerful revolution that toppled a 30-year-old tyrant

Liberals weren’t only ones who saw their dreams fulfilled in Arab Spring, many political leaders of the West also supported revolutions, since it fit their simple idea of regime change

Democracy would finally flourish

So when an uprising began inLibya, Britain, France, and America supported it—suddenly, Colonel Gaddafi stopped being a hero of the West

All politicians, PR, and academics suddenly disappear, and Gaddafi becomes an evil dictator once again

November 2011, large convoy was spotted leaving Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte—American drone controlled from desert location in Nevada sent to follow it

Operator fires missile at lead car of convoy—Gaddafi flees to hid from rebel forces, hiding in drainage pipe; he’s murdered

Instead of becoming a democracy, Libya descends into chaos

Everywhere, movements were failing

Occupy reaches gridlock

They have no picture, no utopic vision of the future—their vision was about how you manage things, not an idea

Same in Egypt: once the march arrived in Tahrir Square, there was nothing to do—Muslim Brotherhood rushes in to fill vacuum

Mohamed Morsi becomes president, shocking liberals and left

Liberals and left turn to military to save them from Islamists

In Spring of 2013, military takes action, arresting president and killing hundreds of his protesting supporters—spectacle unravels in square as past internet activists welcome the return of the military (they’d been summoned there, again, via Facebook)

After failure of revolutions, it was not just radicals, no one in the west had an idea of how to change the world

At home, politicians had given all their power away to powers of finance and managerial bureaucracies that they in effect had become managers in themselves

Abroad, their adventures had failed and they’d been exposed as dangerous and destructive

Cue Russia: group of men who saw this era of uncertainty as opportunity theater where nobody knew what was true or fake any longer

They’re called “political technologists”: the key figures behind President Putin, keeping him in power unchallenged for 15 years

Some of them had been dissidents back in the 1970s and were greatly influenced by the Strugatsky brothers’ scifi writing

20 years later when Soviet falls, they rose up to take control of the media, using it to manipulate the electorate on a mass scale—reality was puddy in their hands

But technologist emerges who takes it all a bit further: Vladislav Surkov

He comes from the theater world, took its avant-garde ideas into the heart of politics

His aim wasn’t merely to manipulate people, but to go deeper and undermine their very perception of the world so they are never sure of what is really happening

He uses Kremlin money to sponsor all kinds of groups: from mass anti-fascist youth organizations to Neo-Nazi skinheads; as well as liberal human rights groups who attacked the government

Key: he let it be known that this is what he was doing: so no one knew what was real and what was fake—a strategy of power that kept people constantly confused, “a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it is indefinable”

Meanwhile, real power is elsewhere, exercised without anyone seeing it

Same thing is happening in the West

By now, it’s obvious the system had deep flaws –every month were new revelations: banks’ involvement in global corruption, massive tax avoidance by all major corporations, secret surveillance of everyone’s emails by NSA

Yet, no one save for low-hanging fruit are prosecuted—and behind it all, the massive inequality kept on growing

Yet, the structure of power remained the same, nothing ever changed, because nothing could be allowed to change the system

Cue: “then shapeshifting began” with Trump’s ever-changing campaign

Politics where everyone could be bought, using words that could have come from the Occupy movement

But he also uses the language of fascist neo-nazis

Doesn’t matter how little what he says relates to reality; this destroys journalism—Putin admires this

Liberals were outraged by Trump, took to internet to express their anger, which changed nothing—algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people they agreed with

Ironically, their massive amounts of angry tweets and facebook posts only benefited the large corporations who ran the social media platforms—“Angry people click more”

Trump and Serkov realize same thing: the version of reality that politics presented was no longer believable; the stories politicians tell their people about the world stopped making sense—in this face, you could play with reality and weaken old forms of power

Another force was about to show just how weak politics had become in the West: Syria

Syrian civil war: what started as Arab Spring exploded into battle to the death

Battle was between Bashar Assad and his opponents

At the heart of the conflict is the force his father brought to the west: suicide bombing

Back in 1980s, Assad saw suicide bombing as a way to drive Americans out of the middle east (when Regan sent “neutral troops” after SAMSA camp massacre)—over 30 years the tactic transformed into something of its opposite: tearing the Arab world apart

Hafez’s dream of a powerful Arab world was destroyed; in Iraq, extremist Sunni groups used suicide bombing to start sectarian war—now, groups like ISIS brought the techniques into Syria to attack not just Assad’s son, but his fellow Shi’ites

Like his father, Bashar retaliated with vengeful fury, and the country fell apart

Faced by war, Western politicians were bewildered: they were determined to claim Bashar was evil, but then realized that his enemies were more evil than he was